Rights and Duties, Privileges and Obligations

Blog Thoughts, Current News, politics

[Warning: this is a polemic. I use generalizations and trends. To any who think “but not all X are like that,” yes, I know, and this doesn’t apply to those people. This could likely be turned into a really great sermon. Few preachers would, because he fears what his wife will say… Onward!]

Back in the Old Testament days,  God and His people had a deal. An arrangement. A covenant. We worshipped Him, He saved our souls. We had duties and obligations, which came with perks and privileges. There was order and hierarchy. When we did our duty to God and each other, life was good, and when we didn’t, things got pretty rocky. After a while, we’d “pull our head out,” and beg for forgiveness, He’d bail us out, and things would get better for a while. Then we’d forget our duties and obligations God and each other and things would fall apart. Wash, rinse, repeat. Again and again. That is the cyclical story in the OT. Believing, falling away, getting warnings, crashing and burning (cue Sodom and Gomora, Noah, etc.),  repenting, and getting back on track with tradition.  Continue reading Rights and Duties, Privileges and Obligations →

Rapidly Advancing AI, and some problems

Current News, Education, politics, science

Artificial Intelligence, AI, such as the LLMs Grok, Claude, Chat-GPT, etc., are now advancing at an incredible rate.

I’ve seen several people post references to this, Something Big Is Happening, recently, and related AI-disruptions in business like Bro-Bots at the bottom of this Coffee and Covid blog post. Related to this with specific examples in video, Claude Opus 4.6: The Biggest AI Jump I’ve Covered–It’s Not Close. (Here’s What You Need to Know) Given the predicate of my first novel is AI gone wrong, and redeeming itself, commenting on developments is quite appropriate and in-theme for this blog.

Right off the top of my head, there are several things to address, aside from all the military applications (a huge topic on its own).  We have the economics of the AI industry itself, confidentiality / privacy / privilege of the queries and output, marriage-market and social disruption from job losses, legal liability for decision / actions taken because of AI outputs, raising up the next generation of leaders who know enough on their own without AI to sanity-check AI output, socioeconomic disruption from job losses due to AI replacement, electrical power and cooling demands (more electricity and/or lots of water).

Military applications, and disruptions that come from new tech advances brought about by AI are huge and complex and speculative, worthy of long essays in their own rights.
Continue reading Rapidly Advancing AI, and some problems →

Medical NAxALT

Current News, Disease, politics

The NAxALT Fallacy (Not All [x] Are Like That) is the idea that because you can point to an exception to a generalization, it fails. Some people think that finding a specific counter-example of some item (the “x”), that the general statement about that group is not only not a useful generalization, it is likely totally invalid and  baseless, erroneous, biased, counterproductive, and maybe even racist, bigoted, and saying it is a potential hate-crime. It’s often used, either with good intent or ill, to derail or side-track an argument rather than try to understand the core issue. This is especially true of personally uncomfortable topics. Yes, yes, we KNOW that we are making a generalization, and there are exceptions. Yes, sure, of course there are marginal and messy cases. That doesn’t invalidate the general statement as a useful heuristic to understanding what’s going in in the world. Continue reading Medical NAxALT →

RIP Ruffles, a true and faithful sidekick

Home life

She’d been picked up as a stray  outside Spokane in the middle of winter, weighing just a scrawny 37 pounds at about one year of age. After a month at the shelter there with nobody adopting her, she was moved to the Seattle area. She had gained a bit of weight, now up to 47 pounds. Someone took her home, then returned her as “defective,” because they wanted a guard dog and they said “she didn’t bark at anything.” We adopted her and took her home early 2012. After a month with us, eating well, sleeping inside, and getting lots of love and exercise with our two then-young kids, she was up to 57 pounds.

Continue reading RIP Ruffles, a true and faithful sidekick →

Kindle side-loading going away, call for typo feedback

Upcoming books and projects, writing

Amazon announced that they will move to ONLY allowing people to load kindle book onto their device wirelessly. No more downloading the file to your HD, then side-loading it via a USB so you can work in remote places, or keep a backup of something you bought. They are turning books into a revocable service rathe than something you own.

In consequence, I’ll have to prioritize moving to paper. As such, I’d rather like to fix any typos I have in them before I commit it to ink on paper for the books which are not on paper yet. Feel free to add comments to this post to report any typos, plot holes, ambiguous grammar, etc., that any of my stories have. School keeps me busy, so I’ll aim to get a bunch done this summer.

A short hunting story

Guns, Home life, Uncategorized

My son and I went deer hunting opening weekend. Packed up and drove to south-central WA to camp out and chase mule deer for a couple of days. Weather was fine, dry and clear, getting lower 40s overnight and a high in the 60s in the afternoon. He’s old enough now to be a hunting partner in the sense of “I’ll post up here, you sneak around that-a-way and circle around over there” or “you hang out here and watch those openings, I’ll tromp through that side of things and see what I can flush out,” not just “follow me around and let’s see what we can find together.”  We have shot together before, at the range and at Boomershoot, so I know he is capable of shooting reasonably well under controlled conditions.

But hunting ain’t targets. Decisions and unknowns are involved.

Saturday (opening day) at dusk, after we’ve both seen numerous does and a couple of spike bucks, in the failing light, he was posted out by himself with a 30-06 and a view parallel to an access road across a draw, a nearly 400 yards across top-to-top. He was on a patch of broken volcanic rock with clear field of view and fire, but rather uncomfortable. He saw coming out of the trees (heavy thickets of oak) a herd of does, and one large buck. But with the fading light with only a 9-power scope, at about 300 yards distance he couldn’t tell if the buck had the 3-pt minimum needed to legally shoot. After watching them for about ten minutes, he told me what he saw over the radio, he sounded like he was pretty sure he could make the shot count (no wind, good positioning and rest, comfortable estimate of the range, etc.) if he chose to take it, and the best advice I could give amounted to “light’s not getting any better. Use your best judgement and make your call, then pull the trigger or put the rifle on SAFE.” Continue reading A short hunting story →

Wool clothing

Home life

Sorry, it’s been a while since I made a general-purpose post. Life can be like that.

I like wool clothing, and natural fibers in general, more than synthetics, at least most of the time. Sure, synthetics totally have their place, and are sometime absolutely GREAT (nomex fire-resistant stuff, for example, and kevlar for some applications). But for general wear, I figure that God made things like wool, silk, flax, and cotton so comfy and usable for a reason. That said, natural products are not quite as consistent or cheap as all the things derived from oil, like rayon, polyester, nylon, etc. Continue reading Wool clothing →

Parents obit

Home life

My brother wrote this up and sent it in the Juneau Empire, the local newspaper where I grew up and my parents lived most of their life. It is for both my dad, who died earlier this year, and my mom, who died Thanksgiving day about two and half years ago. Since they spent more than half their lives together, remembering them together makes sense. Continue reading Parents obit →

Dad died

Home life

My father, James “Jim” Nelson, has died, at the age of 96, almost 97. His wife of more than 66 years, my mom, died on Thanksgiving Day two and a half years ago. He was not the same after she passed away, but he was a tough old bird that was still going for walks largely unassisted as recently as last year. His recent decline from needing a bit of help, to needing a walker, to needing a wheelchair, to not being able to get out of bed without assistance was relatively rapid. His mother had survived to 99. He died with both my brothers near at hand, as the morning sun peaked above the horizon and into his window, with birds chirping outside on the windowsill. All his children and grandchildren had the chance to see him and say goodbye within the previous 3 days.

Continue reading Dad died →

Updated CDC birth/death stats; not believable

Disease

Looking at the most recent CDC numbers here, a few things stand out. First of all, pretty much everything is flatlined within less than one standard deviation of mean since Jan 2020, in spite of all the news stories of “Died Suddenly,” athletes collapsing, empty neonatal wards, booming business from mortuary companies, huge increases in cases of child deaths being reported, huge increases in life insurance payouts and disability enrolment, etc. All that death and destruction reported, and…. official numbers are flat. Continue reading Updated CDC birth/death stats; not believable →